Modelling with Outlines

abstract: We show you, how you can start with an empty mesh, draw an outline of an object and eventually create the full 3D-model. In the final step the object will be turned into a Sculptie using some primstar magic. Important Note: Please take a minute to read the Tutorial license terms.

Transcription

Hello and welcome!

Today let us make a wineglass by first creating an outline, and then fold it into the 3D-space.
I will take care of the object’s LOD-behaviour ring the construction.
Let us first load a simple wine-glass as background-image.
I will use this image a guideline for the model.

I go to front-view

and there i create a new mesh from scratch.

Open: add, mesh, empty mesh.

Now i go to edit-mode.

I remove the 3D-manipulator because it tends to disturb me during positioning the vertices.

And now i start to draw the profile.
Hold down the CTRL key, then left click for each new vertex.

I roughly follow the outline of the glass and create 8 edges.
This corresponds to the LOD1 vertices in the final shape.

Then i select all vertices and subdivide once and adjust the new vertices.
These will correspond to the LOD2 vertices.

I subdivide again to get the LOD3 vertices.

I want the start point and the end-point of the outline at the same position in the x-y plane.

So i go to top-view and there i press: s, shift-z, zero.

At the end i place the cursor as exactly as possible over the two points.

I select all vertices.

Then i configure the spin-tool to spin around 360 degrees, and i use 32 steps.

Then I click on the spin-button.

So here is the wine-glas. It is made out of 32 faces in x, and 32 faces in y.
Let us go to object-mode now, and apply the magic part:

go to: object -> scripts -> sculptify objects

In the UV-image editor enable: “Synch UV and Mesh selection”

Select the leftmost and the rightmost column in the UV-map.

And now remove doubles.

This stitches the plane together along the selected edge.
And so this effectively changes the sculptie-type from plane to cylinder.
Now you can do some fine-adjustments on your shape.
Finally: Render, Bake sculpt meshes.

And here is a trick for a quick check, how your sculptie will later look alike in your online world:

go to the image-editor.

Then: image, import as sculptie.

In the link and materials section, enable: set smooth.

In some cases You might encounter a couple of problems here.
If your object is rendered in a very dark-grey shade, then go to edit mode,
and immediately step back to object-mode. That often helps.

If your object is completely black then it has been created inside-out.
This can happen because we started with an empty mesh.
And it is not exactly determined which side of the constructed mesh
is the inner side of the object.

You can repair that as follows:

go to edit mode

and then: Scale, x, -1.
This will mirror the object and at the same time it will flip the object normals.

Please note, that directly flipping the normals
with blender does not work at all with sculpties.

If the object still shows very dark areas on its surface,
then your object probably suffers from the light-bleeding effect.

If you encounter this problem:

go to edit-mode and check the edges near the dark spots.

shift these edges nearer towards each-other
(Do not collapse them into each other!!!).

This will reduce or even avoid the light bleeding effect.

I have shown you in this tutorial:

how to work with an outline

and preserve control over the level of detail.

You now know where to find sculptify-objects and how to use it.

You can use “image import-as-sculptie” to quick check your object.

We have seen how to fix the inside-out effect.

And we now know how to reduce the light bleeding on sharp edges.

Thank you for watching.

Have a nice day!

42 Enlightened Replies

Great tutorial after watching it i had the idea of useing this process toreate a sculptie from mesh curves. Sililar to nurbs moddleing with the ep curve tool in maya and useing loft. howerev not finding a loft tool in jass/blender i drew a basic outline then used the extrude option.

the end result was a hollow cube with a curved top. for the moast part this worked but the object was 2sided a waist of faces in sl with moast sculpts also textureing issues like half the texturemap would be likely inside the sculpt where we don’t need to see. and when i try’d a more complicated shape it completly broke on the conversion to a sculptmap. I found moddleing with curves a very fast way to create custom shapes in maya and would love to be able to use a similar process in blender.

would you be able to at anypoint in time make a tutorial for this type of moddleing that explained the steps involved inabit of detail. that is if it’s actually possable